The Bowes Museum Announces Vivienne Westwood: Rebel – Storyteller – Visionary

There are exhibitions that celebrate fashion. And then there are those that mischievously rewrite the rules.

At The Bowes Museum this spring, Vivienne Westwood: Rebel – Storyteller – Visionary (28 March – 6 September 2026) does not politely archive a designer—it summons a force of nature. Part punk sermon, part couture séance, the exhibition unspools the extraordinary mind of Vivienne Westwood, Britain’s most gleefully subversive fashion revolutionary.

MacAndreas pink mohair wraparound jacket with matching skirt, tie and college cap, and Hals blouse. Anglomania, AW 1993/94. Mohair, wool, cotton.

More than 40 ensembles, from the early 1980s through to the protest-charged 2000s, arrive like characters in a particularly stylish uprising. Corsets cling to the walls beside anarchic T-shirts. Jewellery, ephemera and accessories (many drawn from the trove of collector Peter Smithson) whisper stories of sedition, seduction and historical mischief. Rare pieces from Manchester Art Gallery and Fashion Museum Bath deepen the plot, revealing the extraordinary breadth of Westwood’s creative world...

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Image Credits:

Lead: British Fashion designer Vivienne Westwood at her Worlds End Chelsea Store, London, UK, 1987. Courtesy of The Bowes Museum.

All further images courtesy of The Bowes Museum and as credited in photo captions.